Warlock Rework 5e

[Martin Glow]

Wereally need to rework affliction warlock, it feels awkward to play after shadowlands

Dots fade too fast, aoe damage is lower than destro, boomie, feral, and its similar to shadowpriest damage aoe damage just dont have burst like shadowpriests.

Also destruction immolate ticks are equal to affliction unstable affliction, agony and corruption damage all together, while also inquisitors gaze damage proc rate higher like 5 times than affliction. There literally issues within affliction.

Aff has been insufferable since losing the Deliberate Malice set bonus from SL. The spec is so GCD starved as it is just in dot maintenance. Blizz identified this issue in S1 and attempted to address it by adding a GCD to Soul Swap

But shadowbolt? What are they even thinking, shadowbolt is least considered spell that affliction will pick. Casting? There is no time to cast that haha, dots are fading faster than you can think off, i would like to see any of blizzard try casting shadowbolts in arena as affliction it hits like 10k dmg you need like 300% damage increase to make it viable

So lets say we face mistweaver, demon hunter + Balance druid

what happens is that this team have atleast 3 full dispels + curse dispel

this means that affliction warlock is barely able to keep dots on targets.

Lets not forget 4 stuns, 2 incaps, 1 fear, + spammed cyclone.

Slows:

99% of classes can remove slows by their own, dps,healers or any other

so slows are barely helping affliction (compare to shadowlands, there was lower amount of classes who had access to remove slows)

Starvation of globals:

Affliction warlock to setup a darklare for 2 enemies (not 3) have to atleast use 7 globals to pop darklare

along soulswap with additional 3 malefic rapture globals to get advantage of malefic affliction so in total 10, by that time either dots are fading.

Casts:

too many casted spells which are fillers,

Drain soul (shadowbolt not viable, cause it does 0 damage at full gear 4 set it hits 50k with shadowbolt proc )

drain life

malefic rapture

Unstable affliction

Pvp talents:

Rampant afflictions - mandatory

rapid contagion - mandatory

Other talents - situational

by that it means that affliction warlock cannot replace other 2 pvp talents to play like other warlock specs.

Shadowrift - not playable as affliction

Essence drain - not playable as affliction (you dont drain life until u got 50 stacks of inevitable demise)

Rot & decay - not playable as affliction (you dont drain life until u got 50 stacks of inevitable demise)

Deathbolt - not playable as affliction (does low damage, easily countered by any dispel class)

Bond of fel - not playable as affliction

Impish instincts - very good talent (playable)

Soul rip - very good talent (playable)

Call observer - very good talent (playable)

Demonic gateway - very good talent (but not playable, as there are better talents to pick)

Our class also lacks additional magic school, as unending resolve/fear/dark pact are all on same shadow school, it means if affliction got kicked it cant access to damage, crowd control or defensives spells.

Agony - have to be redesigned from curse to magic or have different solution or reduce amount of classes which are able to remove that curse, as it currently one of most vital spells for affliction which can be removed with short cooldowns by 7 DPS specs + 3 healers specs (remove curse) which allows to stack drain life heals.

Dispels - Because of large amount of dispels in the game makes affliction lower viability. Suggestion would be to add pvp talent which makes our dots (certain) either undispellable or increase punishment for that dispel ( current 250k dispel against 700k hp classes are barely effective)

Or consider looking at classes which have way too many dispels, with any of these classes grouped in 3v3 situation, affliction become useless and easy to counter

Shamans - Curses dispel + magic dispel

Druids - Curse dispel + magic dispel

Mage - curse dispel

Monks - absolutely removing all dots without punishment (revival, Diffuse magic)

hunters - feign death - receives 0 backslash damage, short cooldown

Darksouls misery : in dragonflight with removal of dark souls misery, affliction lost a talent which gave burst damage and control of the game, currently it have nothing.

Summon darkglare sadly does 0 damage

compare to other dot classes they still have big cooldown cd

shadow priest - void form, power infusion

balance druid - incarnation

Pvp talents:

Rampant afflictions are not suppose to be in mandatory talents,

make Unstable affliction applyable to 3 targets without talent, you wont find any affliction warlock who can play without rampant afflictions.

Globals - huge starvation on globals, make lower amount of casted/applied spells required, especially dots, which are most important part for affliction to do damage, without dots malefic rapture or anything else does nothing

Just imagine how cool it would be to have Metamorphosis back in the game. Picture this: summoning all your pets, pressing Metamorphosis, and diving into melee range with your demons to obliterate your enemies. This would not only add a lot of fun to the game but also introduce a new and exciting playstyle.

Well we already in lore have a metamorphosis - Green fire quest solidifies that. Kanrethad used Metamorphosis, Jubeka Shadowbreaker when saw how Kanrethad used dark apotheosis started to theorize that it was some form of Metamorphosis.

yeah , tho from blizzard perspective i mean it will be easier for them with new lore to add just demonic transformation that say makes you look like similar to caster felguard or something as meta currently owned by DH and i doubt blizzard will be cool with lock and DH same exact stuff

yeah i totally agree with you its silly , tho with 20 years naming for spec , its abit risky to change it now for sake of simplicity and not confusing people much , as random spell and spec name not same thing for sure

Matter of the fact is that Blizzard have a set of new developers and they think ruining everything before them and bringing in what they think is good is a sign of merit, where in reality its basically an ego thing and its been ruining the classes and the story of the game.

Another thing is to make NP cast and forget ability - it is a 3 min CD spell, just by the CD alone that spell should not require any extra action from you. You need to activate it and it should summon all demons by itself. Like the Army of the Dead.

Yeah it was sometimes problematic, but to be honest usually it depends on boss, like for example sarkareth forced you to move from the start, which was quite annoying, but if you feel how boss works you could always find a window for NP

Besides fantasy of the summoner is not is stiff as the current Demonology.

Demonology before had a good summoner design - summon any of 5 demons you have and each of them will be great. No forcing Felguard as the main demon, no leaving of 4/5 of your demons behind because of degenerate modern designers of the warlock.

If this were to be lost for metamorphosis then fair enough, trading one amazing design for another would be grand but no, we lose an amazing fun cooldown to be replaced with shadow bolt buffs, more crit interactions and super boring attack speed alterations without even returning reign of tyranny (or tyrant in general) to its former glory. This is not the rework we want and I beg of Blizzard please do not do this!

Honestly , all i want is Tons and tons of hard hitting demons for Demo , maybe Buff imps , make some demons permanent ( or longer ) or scrap the entire portal thing and buff tyrant / change it.

Demo is fine but needs TONS AND TONS OF HASTE to get anywhere Destro and demo needs a aura buff of like 5-10% to be competive with other classes.

Affliction was always button bloat. In tbc we had Corruption, agony, UA and Siphon Life.

I think they should give us malefic Grasp as talent instead of Drain Soul. And malefic grasp also replaces Drain Life.

ive always liked demo since beginning it was the only spec with soul link with 31 points to the tree and later they even got metamorphosis which were fun but ive always hated the spell doom, rework doom thank you

World of Warcraft is a game of fantasies. Power curves, cinematic experiences, strategic and intellectual challenges, all shaped to reinforce a core identity. The mighty Warrior, the evasive, all powerful Mage, the stealthy and duplicitous Rogue.

However, this loop was horrible experience in WoW Alpha. It was merely a matter of time before a Warlock defeated any player while the other player was unable to respond. There are few things as anti-fun as long periods of agency free gameplay.

This worked well for the solo experience. It was fun to take the risk of raising your ember levels as high as possible, then purging them off at the last second or blowing up one last enemy quickly. However, two major problems remaining:

So why was this model never used for a caster resource system? The longer I looked at it, the more I realized this an ideal solution for the day-to-day woes of most caster classes. Every other class came up with some way of addressing what was ultimate a core mana problem.

Mages got instant relocation (blink) along with many mana regeneration tools. Balance druids got innervate to passively surge up manage without breaking their stride. Elemental Shaman got mana totems to recharge them and their team. Shadow Priests innately regenerated mana from dealing damage. Warlocks had life tap.

This is a great read and highly interesting. Thank you for putting in the effort to describe my (and many others) most beloved iteration of the Warlock class design. I am especially interested in what made you give Destruction Warlocks so many instant casts. I loved it!

I remember back in vanilla each spec had an underpinning theme, where the idea was that the warlock sacrificed one aspect of the class to achieve something extreme. Destro was extreme burst, demo was extreme survivability, and aff was extreme sustain. Nobody could outburst a destrolock, nobody could outlast an afflock, and outside of legit tanks, nobody was more durable than the demolock. This is sort of what put that spec on the outs, its only place was in questing, pvp other and the occasional gimmick encounter. It was a tank on the outside but not on the inside.

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